Thanks for asking! Here’s my answer.

As a fan of Polaris, like everything else I’m a fan of, my priority is seeing Lorna treated well by Marvel. That is the most important thing to me. Lorna as a team leader, Lorna beating Havok or some other character, etc, none of that matters unless Lorna is getting treated well at the same time.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario that I hope makes it clearer. Lorna’s a team leader. But she’s depicted as a raging asshole that constantly abuses her team members, spouts racist lines, and runs away in terror any time she has to fight. Should a book with her depicted like that still be read because she’s the team leader?

Treatment of Lorna is currently overall good from what I’ve seen and heard, but there was a lot of bad stuff before, and a bad cover for Blue #28 coming up, that cause me to not read it yet until I trust that it’s safe.

I could also describe how things were for me Lorna on All-New X-Factor, the first time Lorna got to be a team leader in her own right, by ANXF #6. I almost dropped that book for the same reason, and only ANXF #7 kept me from doing that.

As for why I don’t read it anyway, under the thinking of “you need to know the intimate details of what’s happening to her,” I have two reasons.

The first reason is about the message sent. If you say “this book is awful, why do this to her,” and so on but then read it anyway, you’re sending a message that it must not really be as bad as you say it is. You’re saying no matter what they do to her or how bad it gets, they’ll get your money anyway, so what you have to say doesn’t really matter.

The second reason is that if it’s bad, I don’t want it anyway. In the pure financial sense, I can spend that money on something that I actually want. Get a nice sandwich, or let it add up and commission an artist to draw something I really want. In the broader sense, there’s no fulfillment in the feeling that I’m throwing my time/money away on something I know I won’t enjoy.

In the case of Blue, my reason isn’t about current quality of writing anymore. It’s that I don’t yet trust future quality. I might if Blue #28 turns out to be much better than the cover makes it look like it will be.

Too much has happened for me to think this sort of stuff visually happening is not an intentional snub.

First there was Enchantress made to look more like Lorna with Wanda on a heavily-promoted Axis variant cover, while an ANXF cover that actually had Lorna and Wanda together was kept offline and out of view until the Friday before the issue’s release.

After Axis and its forced retcon on Wanda and Pietro being Magneto’s kids, there was the blatant attempt to give Wanda and Pietro a “replacement sister” in the form of Luminous, using an all-blue color scheme instead of a green one to be slightly less obvious about it.

And then there’s the X-Men anniversary covers that all connected into one big image. They had Havok fighting alongside 4 of the original 5 X-Men for one cover, but they excluded Lorna completely, even though she also become an X-Men member (its second female member at that) AND was introduced before Havok.

This is on top of how the Avengers side of Marvel went out of the way to exclude Lorna from everything she had a right to be in, from Avengers vs X-Men to Axis and more. During Children’s Crusade, they even went as far as removing Lorna from a recreated picture from House of M that she was originally in.

Having talked a little with Kelly Thompson, I believe she had good reason to use Brand (she said Kitty and Brand have history together and I’ll trust her on that), and nothing necessarily “required” Lorna to be there.

Yet, visuals are an entirely different story. Brand was drawn with long loose hair and no glasses, wearing purple – the color second most commonly associated with Lorna – and positioned between two women who happened to be wearing green dresses.

All the visual cues that are always associated with Lorna were present. There were no visual cues to suggest Brand. That’s why everyone thought it had to be Lorna until Kelly Thompson said it wasn’t.

And one possible argument to be had on visuals might have been that there were no mainstay costume features for Lorna present either, but any right to that argument was lost when Marvel decided to give her costumes on ANXF and now X-Men Blue that have none of those iconic costume features.

In ANXF and now Blue, Marvel has basically said “you should recognize Lorna by the fact she’s a woman with green hair and nothing else.”

If Marvel’s not going to let Lorna have iconic costume features that stick with her across costumes, like Brand does with her glasses, then they have by default said any woman with green hair and no other distinguishing features must be assumed to be Lorna. Which means Brand is visually invading Lorna’s territory here.

So, again on Thompson’s end from what she said, it looks like she’s in the right. However, there’s a problem with whoever decided on visuals for the issue. There’s too much recent history and there are too many factors involved for me to treat it as unintentional.

There’s another scene of the issue that Kelly Thompson, I think part-jokingly, said she considers a dancer in the back to be Lorna. I’ll talk about that more later. The short of it is that given history of treatment toward Lorna and how Brand looks, saying “I believe that dancer is Lorna” means nothing. It’s fanon. It’s not Marvel actually saying it’s her and making people aware it’s her. Without real official backing, it’s just another random green-haired woman, like Carmilla Black.

1) I assumed people keeping a closer eye on the specifics had read it and knew it was Lorna. So, in the strict sense of correcting a mistaken assumption, thanks.

2) Since you’re anon, I don’t know if the “racist” line is meant to be joking or troll bait. I’m assuming troll bait since you followed up with badmouthing Lorna for no reason.

It’s also not going to stop me from saying things I was always going to say when I learned this.

I’m not surprised it’s not “supposed” to be Lorna. I was surprised when I thought it was Lorna, because Marvel has such a history of pretending she’s worthless and keeping her out of weddings and events that my default assumption is that they’ll deliberately exclude her.

It’s a shame that Marvel is proving me right yet again.

It’s also a shame that they’re proving me right that they have something against Lorna deliberately. If it had been Lorna back there, then her being between two women wearing green would’ve been fine. But you combine those two women in green not only beside Abigail Brand, but Brand without her glasses and with loose long hair, and it becomes pretty clear someone at Marvel is doing this on purpose to be a tool.

I’ve talked about this sort of thing before. I just don’t think I’ve ever been this explicit about it in a post before.

Polaris is a multifaceted character. She has a lot to offer, and a lot of untapped potential. The thing is, she also has a long history of her potential getting undermined for the sake of promoting the stories of other characters and making those other characters look better. Sometimes it’s a simple “this character beats her” situation, but sometimes it’s more complex.

Because of this history, it’s important to be cautious of how Lorna is treated in connection to her relationships. It’s important to strike the right balance and right tone.

If you focus on Lorna and completely exclude all her relationships, then she has nowhere to go and no collaborative opportunity for development. She needs Magneto, Scarlet Witch, Jean Grey, Iceman, etc so that she can interact with them and show her sides while also helping the other characters demonstrate their sides.

You may have noticed that in a lot of my proposed ideas for Lorna interacting with other character, I emphasize shared territory and how Lorna can help them just as they help her. Lorna interacting with teen Jean is useful cause Lorna was the second female X-Men member and has early history with Jean as women. Lorna interacting with Iceman (teen or adult) is useful cause she was part of a love triangle involving Iceman in the early days, so she has insight into his relationship history as a previously closeted gay man that other women don’t have.

If you focus on Lorna’s relationships and put everything of who Lorna is and what she can offer in her own right to the side, then Lorna gets nothing out of it. She stops being a character and starts being a plot device to put other characters on a pedestal.

Much of Lorna’s history with Havok has been existing as his girlfriend. In that time, writers would have her quit things she cared about just cause Havok wanted to quit them (e.g. leaving the X-Men), or spout ideals and do things only to follow up with lines like “I thought of what Alex would want me to do.”

With Magneto, as written in too many more recent cases (but not THE most recent issues of Blue), her status as Magneto’s daughter has been emphasized to a point of robbing her of agency and keeping her away from other possible interactions. An attack happens on HQ, she somehow acts surprised so Magneto can “correct” her, despite her history surviving a genocidal surprise attack on Genosha. Her ‘Mistress of Magnetism’ codename gets twisted into looking like something she’s only allowed to have cause Magneto’s her dad. Things like that.

Balance is important. Lorna needs to be able to interact with other characters and build her relationships, but who she is and what she can offer shouldn’t be entirely sacrificed just to make the other party look better at her expense.

Lorna should not be reduced to “Havok’s girlfriend” or “Magneto’s daughter” to the point where she loses all else about who she is, like Genosha survivor, or mutant rights activist, or all sorts of things that make her who she is.

A normal person is not defined exclusively by “so and so’s daughter” or “so and so’s girlfriend.” When news agencies refer to accomplished women as things like “George Clooney’s wife” in the headline and don’t use their name, they get rightfully called out for it.

The same applies to Lorna. She’s more than just someone’s daughter or someone’s girlfriend. She’s Lorna Dane.

With this in mind, two things.

One, it’s important to be attentive to one’s own ways of supporting a character to see what direction they’re taking.

Two, it’s important to watch what other people are emphasizing as the most important thing to notice about Lorna.

Cause if it’s all or almost all about how she’s Magneto’s daughter or Havok’s girlfriend, and everything else is ignored or hardly mentioned? That’s bad for her. That’s placing her beneath those characters, setting her in their shadow, and saying she can’t ever be her own unique and meaningful self without their presence to define her entire being. It ends up saying she can’t deviate from them in any way.